Everybody wants to be famous. And cool. Famous and cool. Fame alone isn't much worth striving for – after all, Josef Fritzl is famous and he's nobody's role model. No, everybody wants to be a celebrity. That's not much of an ambition either, frankly. Until you get there, you're miserable. Once you get there you discover (I'm guessing, obviously) that it often involves doing things you don't actually want to do, like pretending to be happy about meeting Jeremy Clarkson, and that makes you miserable too.

It's not just people who strive to achieve the heady mix of recognition and acclaim that celebrities enjoy. Every sport that isn't football, and for that matter every football league that isn't the Premier League, wants it too. They want to be talked about. They want to be popular. They want to be cool.

Snooker is not cool. Sure, the best players achieve a certain level of fame, but they never enjoy the breakout success of the truly trendy. You know you've hit the big time when you see somebody else wearing what appears to be your own hair, but where the Beatle, the Beckham and the Rachel from Friends led the way, the Ray Reardon strangely failed to follow. Nike never asked Cliff Thorburn to put his name to a range of swoosh-branded patent leather footwear. And then there's the clothes. A fashion-conscious youth who sees a man sporting a dress shirt, waistcoat and bow tie is considerably less likely to praise his dress sense than to steal his mobile phone. No, there's no getting away from it, snooker is not cool.

But it's trying. Last week Ronnie O'Sullivan launched "the future of snooker" – a half-hour, condensed version of the game which television viewers should find very much like watching highlights of the old version of snooker, without anyone having been required to edit out seven hours of rubbish. This is a promising first step.

What the sport really needs, though, is a true star, someone to drag it into the spotlight by embodying the ultimate celebrity package of astonishing skill, swaggering sex appeal and, ideally, a surprising post-retirement talent for ballroom dancing. And while it waits for that person, it's got Peter Ebdon.

Ebdon is an unlikely hero. He's nearly 40, lives in Budapest, once had a ponytail and has a fiancée called Nora. His focus on the game is so absolute that he is widely considered, by his own admission, "a horrible so-and-so". Sure, a musical side-project launched following a successful singing engagement at a friend's daughter's wedding has so far seen him release a couple of singles, but there is absolutely no street credibility to be gained from covering David Cassidy's 1973 No3 hit I'm a Clown (strangely absent from the internet, but here's his self-penned follow-up, Fall of Paradise).

Outside snooker and long-forgotten 70s balladry, the 2002 world champion's interests seem no more likely to engage the public. In an interview earlier this year, for example, Ebdon broached one such subject. "I've had Lexus, Mercedes, Honda, top-of-the-range motors," he said, "and by far, the Skoda had the best windscreen-wipers of them all." The interview was not with Heat magazine.

A few days ago Ebdon announced that when he gets to next week's Shanghai Masters qualifying event in Sheffield he will play really badly. "By the time the qualifiers come around I will not have played for 10 days or more," he said. "I know just how bad I can be when I don't feel properly prepared. As always, I will be doing my utmost to win what is a very important match for me but in truth, my levels of expectation will not be very high." He's got a decent excuse for not practising: this weekend in Hungary Nora will become the second Mrs Ebdon. Had he not told anyone, arrived in Sheffield among the favourites and lost, he could have been in trouble. The bookmakers could have become suspicious. The Gambling Commission might have got involved. (Both of which happened when he unexpectedly went down 5-0 to Liang Wenbo in 2008, though no wrongdoing was discovered.)

The announcement was refreshingly honest, showing a willingness to break bad news in full and in advance that was so lacking from, say, the recent election campaign. This is a man to trust, a man of integrity and honour. Just the man, perhaps, to take snooker global.

But now he's in a pickle. Having told everyone he's going to lose, he has to go through with it. What if he turns up in Sheffield, no pressure on his shoulders, elated after his nuptials, and produces the form of his life? The bookmakers could become suspicious. The Gambling Commission might get involved. Perhaps it's best that he doesn't turn up at all – but then he'll have had even less match practice for his next event, and we all know how bad he can be when he doesn't feel properly prepared. No, he's got little choice now but to abandon his career. Bet he didn't think of that.

Still, Ebdon would leave with his head held high, a hero, of sorts, for some. And snooker's search for a saviour continues. Unless, that is, the Ebdonator turns out to be any good at ballroom dancing.